The most controversial covert policies of that era and this one are connected
to the excesses and the corruption we're seeing investigated and
exposed now. What's the common theme, between the alleged pay offs and
prostitutes and bribery, and running the policies that can't easily
withstand public exposure and Congressional scrutiny? It's not an
obvious one. Why is it in some ways the more prosaic, superficial issue
-- the corruption -- that gets surfaced and investigated -- rather than
the policies connected to it?

And from what I've heard
of the very large contract Wilkes was in discussions to potentially
receive from the CIA, to set up an off the books plane network for the
Agency, and Wilkes and Foggo's earlier activities, for instance,
supporting covert US efforts to arm and fund the contras, that fits
right into the paradigm, the off-the-books secret policy that the tough
guys run steering under the radar of a democratic system, with an
informal network of friends, profiteers, true believers and wanna-bes
on the inside and the outside. Was it just about the money? Or was it
about the semi deniable policy within the policy, run by those who had
proved themselves over time, from Central America and Afghanistan to
cigar-smoke filled Watergate suites, to be reliable members of the club
that doesn't overly concern itself with the law? More than that: it's
about this club's conviction that the law is an impediment to the
national security cause, that the way to run things is through these
informal networks.

Laura's suggesting, it seems, that when prosecutors talk about the Cunningham/Wilkes mess being a lot bigger than hookers and French commodes, they're talking about the way this bribery connects to funding and operating illicit foreign policy operations, operations that overstep law and oversight requirements.

A senior CIA official, meeting with Senate staff in a secure room of
the Capitol last June, promised repeatedly that the agency did not
violate or seek to violate an international treaty that bars cruel,
inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees, during interrogations it
conducted in the Middle East and elsewhere.

But another CIA
officer -- the agency's deputy inspector general, who for the previous
year had been probing allegations of criminal mistreatment by the CIA
and its contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan -- was startled to hear
what she considered an outright falsehood, according to people familiar
with her account. It came during the discussion of legislation that
would constrain the CIA's interrogations.

That CIA officer was
Mary O. McCarthy, 61, who was fired on April 20 for allegedly sharing
classified information with journalists, including Washington Post
journalist Dana Priest. A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that "CIA
people had lied" in that briefing, as one of her friends said later,
not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but
also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered
cruel, inhumane or degrading.

Whether McCarthy's conviction that
the CIA was hiding unpleasant truths provoked her to leak sensitive
information is known only to her and the journalists she is alleged to
have spoken with last year. But the picture of her that emerges from
interviews with more than a dozen former colleagues is of an
independent-minded analyst who became convinced that on multiple
occasions the agency had not given accurate or complete information to
its congressional overseers.

[snip]

In addition to CIA misrepresentations at the session last summer,
McCarthy told the friends, a senior agency official failed to provide a
full account of the CIA's detainee-treatment policy at a closed hearing
of the House intelligence committee in February 2005, under questioning
by Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the senior Democrat.

McCarthy also
told others she was offended that the CIA's general counsel had worked
to secure a secret Justice Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the
agency's creation of "ghost detainees" -- prisoners removed from Iraq
for secret interrogations without notice to the International Committee
of the Red Cross -- because the Geneva Conventions prohibit such
practices.

[snip]

McCarthy "was seeing things in some of the investigations that troubled
her," said one of her friends, and she worried that neither Helgerson
nor the agency's congressional overseers would fully examine what
happened or why. "She had the impression that this stuff has been
pretty well buried," another friend said. In McCarthy's view and that
of many colleagues, two friends say, torture was not only wrong but
also misguided, because it rarely produced useful results. [my emphasis]

Go read the entire article--it's an enlightening profile of McCarthy's career, including details of her earlier objections to some of the previous mistakes in the WOT.

The article, finally, only suggests a conclusion, it doesn't connect the dots. It suggests that McCarthy was fired because she was trying to make it clear that the CIA was lying about its activities related to ghost detainees, extraordinary renditions, and torture. But those dots are clear: McCarthy may have been blowing a whistle on ongoing illegal activities related to the WOT.

But let's put the dots about McCarthy together with Laura's dots.

McCarthy may have been fired because she was blowing the whistle on, among other things, extraordinary renditions

The underlying scandal of the Cunningham/Wilkes case may be the way the bribes funded covert activities, including (but not limited to) running plane companies used for extraordinary rendition

McCarthy gets fired, new dirt on Wilkes comes out, and we begin to learn that the real story is planes for extraordinary rendition. Yeah, I'd say those may be dots.

One more detail. I'm still mystified as to the Kremlinology on these events. Did the White House remove Goss so they could more easily cover up this covert stuff? Who's backing Hayden and why? Well, the McCarthy article provides one clue:

Officials at the CIA and the White House declined to say whether
McCarthy's firing, which came 10 days before her planned retirement,
was discussed between them in advance. But a CIA official said that
when Goss himself was asked to resign two weeks later, Bush thanked
Goss indirectly for the action when he said Goss had "instilled a sense
of professionalism" at the agency.

Goss got shown the door. But he was escorted to the door, not kicked out of it. And as Cheney's (Negroponte's?) thugs were escorting Goss to the door, they were thanking him for showing McCarthy the door, two weeks earlier.

Are you saying she's being threatened, or that she really doesn't have anything on these guys, or that she's in some legal jeopardy?

Might be all of the above. It's so difficult to know--McCarthy's a spook, after all, an old-school spook. I guess the final question is, "Are there things she knows about which she needs to get right with her god." This one cuts that deep.

Back in the day, there was the "secret team" with Ricard Secord and his pals who were running contraband during the Vietnam War using the CIA airline, then running guns to the Contras and drugs to pay for it--at least the drugs part was the allegation. The involvement with the Contras was testified to by Secord himself in the Iran-Contra hearings. Dewey Claridge was one of the pals. I'm sure Dusty Foggo was a sort of Junior hanger-on from those days.

It seems clear that the intersection of shady funding sources for operations that wouldn't get funded in the daylight is a big part of this, and that has been pretty obvious once Wilkes' business dealings received some scrutiny.

These people are so profoundly undemocratic it isn't funny. "Destroying the village in order to save it" was the line form Vietnam, but they are destroying our democracy in order, by their lights, to save it--except for the ones who just want to make a buck and live the high life on the taxpayers' dime.

Yes, the IG could have been getting too close. But read the article--it sounds like she was frustrated with the IG himself on the issues (the Helgerson in the last paragraph in the big McCarthy cite is the IG).

Perhaps McCarthy was fired simply as an attempt to pre-emptively discredit her. They knew she was an internal whistleblower, wanted protection against what she could reveal once the Wilkes/Goss/Foggo/Cunningham scandal blows wide open.

"Don't listen to Mary McCarthy, she was fired for leaking. She's not trust-worthy."

Seems like vintage Cheney. Now, if only she'd been sent on a "Junket" by her "Husband" they'd be celebrating in the OVP.

Just to throw another possible dot out there, 1) we know from the run-up to the Iraq war that this gang think nothing of redirecting appropriated funds to where they prefer having them go; 2) we have heard intermittently about large-scale failures in DOD financial management and self-monitoring (a recent report is described here.), and 3) we've been hearing lately about appropriated funds for the DOD that go unspent by Rumsfeld (who nevertheless complains regularly about inadequate funding).

The question is, what happens to those unspent funds? Do they go forthwith back into the general fund as unanticipated credits, or does it maybe take them a while to get back to the gf, if they ever do? I've heard of accounting adjustments and other such frimframery, but have no idea what the underlying (!) flow of funds would look like. Also I've got about 30 more seconds to spend on this, but fwiw I did run into a link from Brad Blog, who references a Joseph Cannon article that overlaps Laura Rozen a lot, but seems to advance the question of the Wilkes-to-Pentagon branch of the network a bit further. (Yipes! lightning!)

I believe there is a pony around these lines of questioning. Laura Rozen's piece about the "fraternity" of S. Cal Young Repubs, Central America covert ops, leading lights in the Repub House Appropriations and Intelligence committees bears further investigation. The fact that the Dukestir being uncovered came from an intrepid reporter in San Diego doing some fact checking says a lot. How can we be certain that DoJ prosecutors will truly investigate the range and scope of the connections, corruption, crony profits and possibly illegal covert policies that were pursued? Will Gonzales throw a spanner in the works? Just like the wiretap investigation being abandoned due to lack of clearances - is there a particular reason to send Hayden in like plugging the holes. Is there concern that rendition and other activities would get unmasked? There is no doubt that there is way more than meets the eye. Dukestir/Wilkes/Foggo are just the tip of the iceberg!

What will happen is that the Democrats will win the house in 2006, stupidly try to grandstand with public hearings, will give everybody immunity or otherwise taint the waters so that the evildoers get off on legal technicalities, and we get Iran-Contra all over again. If those same Democratic idiots had not screwed up everything then, many of these jerks would have had to do serious jail time and we would not be seeing them in positions of power now. Incredible how long it has taken people to realize that this is Reagan Redux.

For me, the question: "did his wife send him on a junket?" pretty much puts "PAID" on Cheney. It indicates that he knew who Valerie Plame was and that it was possible for her to actually send her husband on a junket, i.e., he knew something about her position and role at the CIA and the reach of it.

Of course, people rarely do things for the first time, so it is traditional to look for patterns when trying to de-code intelligence blips

McCoy wrote in the Politics of Heroin that the French used the legal proceeds of an opium trade in SouthEast Asia to fund its intelligence operations there roughly 1900-1950. Ed Lansdale, leading psy-ops/dirty tricks/counter insurgency/prop up a regime tradition inventor of CIA was posted to Saigon in mid-1950s. Probably heard about it. Lucien Conein was posted there, same time. Conein appointed to lead DEA under Nixon.

A few years earlier, rump of Chnag Kai Schek forces near Burma, funded the fight against Mao with native resources -- Opium. The rump forces were supported by a CIA proprietary airline

Same years, 1950s, Paul Helliwell was doing I forget exactly what running guns in Central America and fancy money laundering stuff. I vaguely recall he may have known the anti-Castro or pro-Havana mob crowd

Anyway, Peter Goss was wet behind the ears in Miami, anti-Castro in about 1961. Was Negroponte there too?

1950s Honey Trap. Sukarno comes to US. Operative who later went to work for Hughes helped video Sukarno with hookers. Blackmail on politicians is useful. See also, J Edgar Hoover

Nixon/China/SALT. A lot of ex-CIA working for Nixon, and suddenly Nixon gets exposed. Team B seeks to discredit detente during the 1970s. Church Committee. Some people thrown out of CIA. Ed Wilson sets up an off-the-books network, shipping stuff, gets rich.

Late 70s, Wilson, Shockley, Secord,Army "narcolepsy" guy get caught (somehow) trying to skim off the shipping expenses of sending arms to Egypt in wake of Camp David accords. People are "freed up" from official CIA who turn up in the Iran Contra saga

BCCI stuff germinates in 1970s. Bert Lance, Billy Carter, First American Bank. What else? Don't know. But Woodward, I think, wrote that Casey came to CIA in 1981 hot-to-trot to set up "off the shelf" networks to supplement official CIA

Shackley plugs in with guy running oil to South Africa. Wierd tango with Israel/South Afirca/USA in those years

ok, long lead intro. This is the time, late 1970s, when someone recrits Foggo. Foggo brings in Wilkes by 1984 to run Congressmen to Central America, introduce them to hookers. Never mind the cocaine stuff, if any. We're concerned about policy.

Foggo was in logistics. My point is that much of the "off the shelf crowd" for 30 years had been in "logistics" in 1978 when Foggo was recruited. It was a known activity. Foggo wasn't inventing it.

Another point. Foggo was new when Wilkes came in. The narrative is that Foggo brought Wilkes in. But Foggo was too junior then. Foggo was not calling shots in 1984.

Who recruited Foggo in 1978? What faction? To what purpose? And reemember, CIA was not a monolith in 1970s. Indeed, Shackley and his crowd were tossed out in those years. By someone with power.

Interesting part of story to is Lowery? Lewis? Anyway, San Diego representative in 1980s had connection to Dixon, I think, S&L scam guy getting his start in early 1980s. Dixon, I think, had connections to real estate/banking crowd centered out of Denver, including people who were involved with Silverado, a bank that made a "sweet deal" with Neal Bush in late 1980s

the whole banking angle is very, very murky to me, but banks keep showing up in the story

Wilkes gets mixed up with Wolrd Finance Corp, in 1984, in connection with the Central America stuff

Wolrd Finace Corp was run by a Cuban, Caregna? sp wrong, who had an anti-Castro connection, and same Cuban did banking business in Texas in early 1980s with both Bush and Lloyd Bentson. Small world. I think the same guy, or a guy with one step of separation, did a real estate deal with Jeb in late 1980s that led to a little scandal

(the guy caught fooling with absentee ballots in Martin County in 2000 was ex-CIA, Miami 1960 vintage, who did real estate upon retirement in 1980s. small world)

Well, where wre we? early 80s. Wierd Israel/South Africa whatever times. Abramoff truns up with bit part in the Central America saga, and goes on to South Africa and other things.

Wilkes/Foggo crony loses seat in House after Dixon scandal in late 1980s. Cunningham takes over

Wilkes gets firmly established in "off the shelf" proprietaries in early to mid 1990s. Invites politicians to meet hookers, etc.

According to Laura Rozen, the big deal in the works just before the plug was pulled was a 300 million contract to run a new "Air America". Taxi smuggled torture victims, and other things, I guess. Again, a fairly familiar pattern, in general.

There are so many interesting questions about how this stuff unraveled recently

but how did it ravel? who was running these clowns in 1978 and 1984?

what networks were they part of? what network was the Wilkes/hooker scam part of?

Most importantly, what remains of those networks? quite a lot, I bet

sorry I cannot remember more of the names tonight. They are published. The books are lying around the house. If any particular aspect sparks anyone's curiousity, post a question, adn I'll try to find where I read it

Iran Contra. Those were the days. Remember the goofy double-hush-hush secret accounts set up with CSF? Account names with initials which were the principal's initial's reversed. Wonder if that guy ever worked again...

Started watching the intelligence committees on CSPAN back then. My favorite inadvertent leak during those hearings (not Iran Contra) was the one about nuclear landmines in West Germany.

The reporting on Dr. McCarthy's character makes me think she will not back away from anything unless she is in legal jeopardy. If she has had an up-close-and-personal look at how this Administration absolutely refuses to abide by the law, she knows she will be savaged in any kangaroo court it sets up to prosecute her. The secrecy mantra will keep facts hidden as it did when she was fired. Equal-oppportunity terrorists are in the White House and its environs.

McCarthy is sporting a nice square of general issue, "National Security Brand" duct tape. I her I was thinking in early 1994 that John Kerry was going to be George Bush's "worst nightmare" because he knew where all the bodies were buried under BCCI. Bones be thicker than water - or blood - I guess.

McCarthy is sporting a nice square of general issue, "National Security Brand" duct tape. And here I was thinking in early 2004 that John Kerry was going to be George Bush's "worst nightmare" because he knew where all the bodies were buried under BCCI. Bones be thicker than water - or blood - I guess.

Thanks for the opportunity to "revise and extend" my remarks. That is all.

You seem to be interested in a general bibliography. I am always happy to talk about books that I have read, so I am happy to pull something together, but it might take a little time. Hectic around here.

But, of course, you should know this is all just amateur interest; I am not an academic, and there are huge holes in what I have read. In general, I feel that you need to read on a subject from several angles (studying footnotes along the way) to get any perspective on any subject. And perspective is especially difficult on a topic where the point is to be secret.

A couple general points that might interest you, off the top of my head.

First, the literature almost loses perspective by defniniton, in my view. I view history as driven principally by broad social and economic factors. Secret macinations -- from mere office politics everywhere to colorful international espionage episodes -- are always around, but not the main drivers, in my view. But, of course, the literature is focused upon the specific maneuvers.

So, even if you can figure out more or less what has happened, it is always a struggle to keep the events in perspective.

Second, I think it is helpful to look at the saga of the last 50 years (very complicated, many sub-plots) in light of the seemingly less complicated story of the previous 50. In particular, it helps to understand, generally, that international bankers and their lawyers [e.g., Dulles and Bush families] had a special role in American intelligence matters at the start of the Cold War period. To a lesser extent, the mob did too. For this reason, people have often been especially suspicious of the CIA generally, and the Bush crowd in particular.

I am not sure that is justified, but it is helpful to understand the broad outlines of the early story.

In general, the history of those early days is driven by two big factors: the Czar, and German war reparations after WW I.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Czar had problems with anarchists, etc. and developed special secret police for infiltrating their world.

The Russian Communists came to know the Czar's techniques quite well, of course, and so came to power circa 1920 with some sophisticated techniques.

The basic technique was to plant double-agents into the society of your opponent. Czar infiltrated radicals. Russian radicals infiltrated the White Russian exile society of Paris in the 1920s.

Britain and Germany tried to use the Russian exile community for information, and as a result, in the 1930s and 1940s, the Russians had penetrated both the British and German intelligence organizations. Good book by a former CIA IG with a history hobby that I have to find. (annoying that I cannot recall the title off hand)

Other things happened too, of course, but this is one big theme.

The second theme I would suggest to you is the importance of german war reparations after the Treaty of Versailles. The big currency flows raised havoc with international currency markets, and were a big concern of the Bank of England in 1920s.

Basically, the idea was to recycle the German payments back to Germany. (Sort of like 'recycling petro-dollars to Latin America in wake of oil embargo in the 1970s -- another project that turned out badly.) The reparations were financed by German bods, I thnk (fuzzy here), that were bought through American and British investment banks. Anyway, whatever the mechanisms, a lot of thre reparation money went back to German in the form of American investments in German industry. [A guy named Higham, wrote an interesting book called Trading With The Enemy that is basically useless because it has no footnotes. But the writing is clear and suggestive.)

The practical consequence for our story is that there were a network of business relationships between American investment bankers and their lawyers and German counterparts during 1930s. This was not conspiracy. Just routine business.

At the same time, there was little in the way of organized international intelligence organization in US. (Domestic intelligence and some South American intelligence was handled by FBI in those days.)

So when WW II came along, it was somewhat natural to turn to investment banker crowd for info about Germany, and to make contacts. Alan Dulles went to Switzerland to attend to the task.

At the same time, there were some very conservative German industrialists who opposed Hitler and his war. The British and Americans were interested in making contact, to depose Hitler, and, perhaps, to make a separate peace without including the USSR. Stalin quickly found out because both the British and German intelligence were pentrated.

A guy named Admiral Canaris was a top German ittelligence guy who had sympathy with the anti-Hitler crowd, and protected them. Promoted the Swiss connection. Also promoted contacts through the Pope for the same purpose.

James Jesus Angelton, famous head of CIA counter-intelligence, was in Italy during WW II, and is implicated in the Pope's contacts with the Nazis.

At the end of the war, the Pope and CIA helped many conservative Germans and some Nazi war criminals escape to Latin America and elsewhere. These were the famous "rat lines."

The Jews found out. And Lofton and others suggest they used the info to blackmail many folks, including Angelton. Not sure.

Anyway, good book documenting CIA recruitment of Nazis at end of WW II is "Blowback" by Simpson, Maryland professor. His theory that these people had impact on American politics in 1950s and 1960s is thin -- not documented like the other stuff.

Another important book by Simpson is The Great Blond Beast, describing how Hitler bribed the German banks and industry to look the other way about his treatement of Jews by giving away Jewish property to them. This policy compromised many conservative German leaders that were in contact with Dulles/CIA.

After the war, we made peace with West German elite rather than bring them to justice. This had practical significance in 1950s intelligence because Wsst German intelligence was thoroughly penetrated by Russians, and so much disinformation was spread to US. Our nteworks in Eastern Europe were rolled up in the 1950s. And counter-intelligence guys like Angelton got ever more paranoid.

Anyway, in the 1950s, George H.W. Bush seems to have made CIA connections with Zapata Oil.

Quick oote on the mob. During Prohibition, various mobs infiltrated local governments, police and mayors. Business reasons. Also, in 1920s and 1930s, mob were drawn into union organizing disputes.

In WW II, American govt wanted to control espionage that could damage vital shipping industry for war. Lucky Luciano was in prison, so intelligence apprached him and asked that he use his influence with Longshoremen unions to control German sabotage efforts.

At end of War, mob contacts with politicians in Italy and France, circa 1948, seem to have come into play.

Not much more time for now. If you have specific questions about anything, I will try to find something. Otherwise, I will pull together my books when I get a chance, and post the book list later.